Considering a finance degree? Explore five business majors that grow financial expertise and discover which path best fits your career goals.
Most people searching for a finance degree picture one thing: a desk, a spreadsheet, and a career spent moving numbers around until retirement. It’s not an unreasonable image, but it’s an incomplete one.
The truth is that finance was never really about the numbers themselves. It’s about understanding how money moves through a business, a market, or an idea, and every one of the majors below teaches that same underlying literacy from a different angle. At Northwood University, that foundation runs through five specific majors worth knowing about before committing to just one.
Bachelor of Business Administration in Finance
For Students Who Want to Understand Markets From the Inside
If there’s a default answer to what a finance degree looks like, this is it, and Northwood’s Finance program leans directly into financial services, investment strategy, and corporate finance from day one. Coursework is built around the mindset of managing, growing, and strategically deploying capital, with a curriculum aligned to major industry certifications, so students graduate positioned to sit for exams like the FINRA Series 7 and the Certified Financial Planner designation rather than starting that credentialing process from scratch after graduation.
This path suits students who want the most direct route into roles like financial analyst, investment associate, or corporate finance manager. It’s specifically great for those who are drawn to the idea of understanding markets well enough to act on them, not just study them from a distance.
Bachelor of Business Administration in Accounting
For Students Who Want Structure and a Credential That Travels
Where a finance major learns to make decisions with money, an accounting major learns to make sure the numbers behind every decision are accurate. It’s a different kind of discipline, and it happens to be one of the largest and most established programs at Northwood, in part because every industry, from automotive to healthcare, needs people who can be trusted with its books.
Northwood’s Accounting program is designed with the CPA license directly in mind, structuring coursework so students earn the credits necessary to sit for CPA certification before they even graduate, regardless of whether they’re studying online or on campus. Students also get direct access to Northwood’s accounting alumni network, and with roughly one in three Northwood graduates going on to own part or all of a business, the accounting foundation often becomes the backbone of ventures that extend well beyond a traditional accounting career.
Bachelor of Business Administration in Data Analytics
For Students Who Want to Turn Raw Numbers Into a Story
This is the major most people don’t immediately connect to finance, and it’s exactly the one that’s growing fastest in relevance. Financial decisions today are made on top of enormous amounts of data, and someone who can actually extract a clear insight from that data, rather than just report it, has become one of the more valuable people in almost any finance-adjacent organization.
Northwood’s Data Analytics program teaches students to work hands-on with big data and cloud computing tools inside real case studies, not hypothetical exercises, and the program can be completed on an accelerated track that pairs the bachelor’s degree with a master’s in as little as four years total for students who want to move quickly. It’s a natural fit for students who enjoy finance’s logical, numbers-driven side but want their day-to-day work centered on uncovering patterns rather than managing accounts directly.
Bachelor of Business Administration in Entrepreneurship
For Students Who See Money as a Tool for Creating Something New
Every business, no matter how creative its product or mission, eventually comes down to a set of financial decisions: what to spend, what to charge, and how to survive the gap between the two. Northwood’s Entrepreneurship program treats that financial literacy as inseparable from the rest of building a business, weaving financial planning directly into coursework alongside strategy, marketing, and innovation management.
Students participate in roundtable discussions with working entrepreneurs and grow relationships with mentors already active in the business community, so the financial thinking they develop gets tested against real ventures, not just case studies. It’s the right fit for a student who wants a finance-grounded education but sees themselves eventually running something of their own rather than managing someone else’s numbers.
Bachelor of Business Administration in Sales Management
For Students Who Understand That Growth Starts With a Conversation
This is the major that most directly connects financial thinking to the human side of a business. Every dollar in a company’s finances starts somewhere, and for most organizations, that somewhere is a sales conversation. Northwood’s Sales Management program trains students to lead revenue teams, manage key accounts, and create the kind of predictable, repeatable growth that finance and leadership teams depend on to plan ahead.
Much of that training happens inside Northwood, the degree equips you with real sales practice, mock interviews, and role-play scenarios, along with in-house sales competitions and virtual meetings with corporate partners. It’s a hands-on approach that suits a student who wants their finance-adjacent education to be around persuasion, relationship-building, and closing deals rather than analysis alone.
Why Major in Finance
Choose the Path That Fits You
Step back from all five: a finance degree was never really a single narrow path. It’s a lens, and the specific major a student chooses just determines what they point that lens at, whether that’s markets, ledgers, data, new ventures, or people.
That’s ultimately the real case for majoring in finance in the first place. A graduate who understands how money actually moves through a business carries that advantage into virtually any career path, whether they end up managing investment portfolios, running their own company, or leading a sales team toward its next quarter. It’s one of the few undergraduate foundations that stays useful no matter how much a student’s specific interests shift between freshman year and graduation.
At Northwood, every one of these five majors is taught by faculty with real industry experience, grounded in the same free-enterprise philosophy that treats financial understanding as something students learn by doing, not just reading about. Whichever direction a student’s interest in finance actually points, there’s a specific, well-built path at Northwood already waiting to meet them there.
